Clearly updating my blog is low on the priority list! A lot has been going on, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts and a project.

I started the year pretty exhausted from the busy holiday season. To say I overextended myself would be an understatement. I won’t go in to the whole woe is me story, but I quickly realized that I needed to shift my focus to something I really wanted to do and something that was just for me. So I picked up some knitting projects.

I hadn’t really done much knitting throughout the autumn – I knit a shawl and a few socks, but most of my knitting time was snuck in during the wee hours of the morning in front of an episode of True Blood, at my weekly stitch & bitch group, or while I was at markets (I have a hard time just sitting there doing nothing, it’s awkward, I’m awkward).

So I decided to dedicate some major time towards some knitting projects after the holidays. I knit the NEVER ENDING Find Your Fade shawl (it did eventually end), a cute little toque for myself, and a few stray socks (still in need of twins). But my favorite project was definitely the Marled Magic Mystery shawl by West Knits!

I signed up for this on a complete whim. I know myself well enough to know that if I’d have stopped and thought about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have signed up. First of all, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE KNITTING. Well, you mostly don’t know. You know it’s a shawl and you need a bunch of yarn, but you have no idea what the shawl will look like until it’s finished. You may be given a few hints, like what types of stitches will be in the pattern, but you’re pretty much going in to the project blindly. You have to give up control and you have to knit the project knowing that it may just end up a total pile of garbage that you hate. But that’s the fun, right? Second, you have to be able to go with the flow and be flexible. If you’re a control freak, this is difficult. I had a hard time.

The way this project worked is that a new part of the pattern was released every week for 4 weeks. So the idea was you would knit each part in a week and then add on to it the following week with the new clue until all of the clues were released. And then you find out whether or not you hate what you just spent a month knitting. Or love – depending on your level of natural optimism/pessimism.

Lucky for me, I ended up really loving the finished project. But with that said, I will most likely never participate in a mystery knit-a-long again. It was stressful. There were many times throughout the project that I thought it looked like garbage, but I powered through and trusted my choices. Luckily everything came together!

And so now the finished project! I’m lucky to have a husband that will model for me (his model face is very serious, but he was actually having a blast).

If you’re interested in the color explosion details, I used primarily Hedgehog Fibres sock yarn – some of the colorways were: Boombox, Teacup, Bramble, a few club colors (Witching Hour and minis without names), some potlucks, and the icord bind-off was in skinny dip. I also used some Kidsilk in Oracle, and knit the rest of the body holding a strand of cream Rowan kidsilk or Drops mohair/silk.